


Scent Memory

by starsoverhead



Category: Power Rangers Wild Force
Genre: Dreams, Gen, Memories, Orgs, Survivor Guilt, impossible love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2013-01-05
Packaged: 2017-11-23 18:08:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/625119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsoverhead/pseuds/starsoverhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merrick always has dreams about the fall of Animaria.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scent Memory

**Author's Note:**

> I have never watched, and do not plan to watch, any other season of Power Rangers, but this one caught my attention by accident. I watched it on YouTube, where it’s no longer available, and I realised a few things. One is that the backstory for this season is amazingly intriguing and I enjoy it - but that it was done a pretty huge disservice by being, well… dumbed-down for a kid show. And the other is that the character of Merrick was most definitely not from the same series as the rest of the characters. Since then, he’s been kicking around my head as a muse, and that’s where this comes from: a more adult-oriented (not necessarily in that way) idea of the backstory from PRWF. This may grow into more - but it also may not. Anyway, enjoy

It still came to him in dreams. At first it was always the stench, like the forests of Half-Earth too short exposed to the sun. Wet, rotting, old leaves, fallen into pools left behind by all of the rain, fermented by heat and animal dung. So out of place on a visit day to the village near the temple.

He saw each detail as if he was there again, there where his heart wanted to be, surrounded by people of all colours, smiling, happy, welcoming the Princess among them, the children eager to see her and always happy to hear her stories.

She was always best with them. She smiled so honestly, so warmly, and they clamored for her attention, for her participation in whatever game it was they’d come up with, and always she would indulge them with the graciousness of one born to lead. The sight always struck his gut. He’d wanted those children to be theirs, wanted to name her his wife, but rank separated them in a way nothing could breach. His place was to protect her, but there in the heart of their kingdom, he’d never imagined it such a pressing need.

But then the stench.

Worse than a skunk long-dead, it caught on the breeze and blew into the village, quickly followed by fetid, choking vines that whipped around and caught people and animals at once. And from there, it was a scene of gore.

The touch of the vines was like acid and magma, leaving behind blood and burns that ate down to the bone. The soldiers immediately acted, sweeping in, all outfitted in unadorned white, armed with blade and shield. They chopped at the vines that fell into stomach-turning green foam as soon as they were cut free from their wielder.

It was a figure of dirty white, face like bone - unmoving, eyes glowing like gems, a horn protruding straight up from its head, hair like a ragged wolf’s pelt - and was surrounded by creatures the likes of which had never been seen, and their people ranged far and wide from northern tundras to southern forests, to islands across the seas and deserts split by rivers. They weren’t, couldn’t be, natural, yet they swept into the village of wood and stone like the ocean’s surge.

It was as if he was there again, hearing the scream of pure fear from the Princess, his Princess, his love, as she saw the oncoming threat and was separated from him by a wave of the stinking beings, some barely even granted a body at all, instead looking like walking grey sludge with eyes like insects.

The first creature ordered others in a tongue native to the land, and that turned his blood to ice. That these horrors would speak his language— it was unthinkable. He drew his weapons, one granted with his enlistment, the other from the Spirits that had Chosen him, and he fought. He was her protector and he would not see her harmed even in the face of these invaders.

The other warriors had come, the higher-Chosen than the soldiers fighting with the might of their Spirits behind them and for those few moments, it granted him relief. His whites were dirtied by sludge and the foul green of these creatures’ death but as he ran, it sloughed away as the armour of his calling protected him.

It took him from the field of battle and as he ran, he could hear the cries of the dying. They weren’t armoured as the soldiers and warriors were. They wore simple woven clothing in the colours of nature, dyed by leaf and stone and shell and flower, and the invaders fought with blade and acid and magic. Around them there were explosions and flames trees left half-standing from careless magics meant only to destroy with no regard to what, precisely, they were destroying.

He had to jump at times, the Princess gathered in his arms, to keep from stepping on fallen bodies that had once been friends. Only the temple was safe and that was where she had to be. “Tell them,” he said to her, his breath ragged from the retreat. “Tell them to retreat.”

As ever in these dreams, as in his memory, once she was safe, his fear became anger and his anger was channeled through the power the Spirits gave him. The sludge creatures fell under his blade and his Spirit weapon. The enemy fighters burst into vomitous froth.

And then his mentor, his friend, was there, sealing the underlings into stone with a mere touch of his fingertips as he fought through them like many danced, with feet as light as a breeze. He brought sunlight to the field of battle and even with such high losses, the white-clad warriors cheered. It seemed the tides had turned at last - until magic swelled the leader of these attackers to a height that dwarfed the tallest of the trees.

Civilians perished. Soldiers were struck down as if they were little more than an annoyance. Warriors fell and the Spirits Chose again, replacing them as they had to from what few of their people were left.

All he could smell was noxious miasma and blight and blood.

Seven. In the end, they were seven against the one - the giant that his mentor faced unfearing, drawing on power that they had seen used before to meet him height for height and power for power, and the six remaining used the magics they’d been taught to raise the temple into the sky with the Princess magically sleeping among the Spirits that they’d been able to save.

Far into the South Kingdom, the fight raged on. The few warriors that hadn’t been petrified put up a fight enough for the six, and they fought as they never had before - soldiers turned warriors, protector turned survivor, all of them mourners for family and friends who were now lost. They looked up at the sound of metal on metal and there he saw his friend, so powerful that all thought him invincible, be destroyed in a shower of sparks.

It was the end of them all.

He always wondered after awakening from these dreams why it was he could never dream of the sunlight, the flowers, the trees, the happy people that had been in his fallen kingdom. The clear air, the songs, the way the Spirits used to walk among them. His parents. Why could he never dream of that instead of the losing battle that was so quickly condensed in his nightly imaginings?

But he knew. Time had left them all behind - thousands of years that he had weathered against his will. If he didn’t remember it, nobody would.


End file.
